


Second Skin

by Letterblade



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Body Horror, Brief Discussion of Bullying, Clones, Everybody Gets to Swear, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Idfic With a Semblance of Plot, Minor Character Death, Mystical bullshit, Sensory Deprivation, Torture, VLDgen, everybody gets whumped, i.e. multiple clones die, identity crisis, so many clones
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-03-02
Packaged: 2019-02-27 05:31:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13241466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Letterblade/pseuds/Letterblade
Summary: If they get out of this one, Lance is going to kick himself foreverthinking of a mission as "whatever, man, infiltrate another Galra cruiser, shoot a lot of robots, let Pidge do a thing, blah blah, can do this in my sleep," because they are so very screwed right now.





	1. Cold Storage

**Author's Note:**

> Late to the show, late to the fandom (hi new fandom!), and just fucking around with clone angst and torture. This is idfic all the way. Loosely post-season-4; Lotor isn't full out crashing on their couch but he might be around somewhere.
> 
> I freely confess I have a tragic track record with abandoned longfics, but let me say right now: I have large chunks of this written pretty much right through the end, probably at least half of the total word count, and it’s also not that long. Probably 8-ish chapters depending upon how I break it down. It may come a bit slow since my day job is also writing so I don’t always have much energy for fun writing, but it’ll come.

 

**CHAPTER 1 - COLD STORAGE**

 

If they get out of this one, Lance is going to kick himself for _ever_ thinking of a mission as “whatever, man, infiltrate another Galra cruiser, shoot a lot of robots, let Pidge do a thing, blah blah, can do this in my sleep,” because they are so very screwed right now. Either that or he _is_ doing this in his sleep. Actually, that would probably explain a lot? Because it’s only in a dream that _this_ shit happens, right? Some crazy nightmare?

Well, he’d have to rewind a bit for the crazy nightmare part. This part feels pretty real. And strangely boring. Mostly because he’s been stuck in this cell with Pidge and Hunk for…hours. At least what’s feels like hours. With nothing. He’s dead thirsty. Nobody’s come for them. Yet.

The druids—there weren’t supposed to be druids, this was 100% surprise druids, because crazy nightmare—had dragged off Allura. They hadn’t seen her since everything went south. Apparently she justified special treatment. Lance is gonna rip their faces off.

Shiro, well.

Fuck.

That was kind of how the crazy nightmare had began.

Team Science Twin’s data mining Galra detector _thingie_ had picked up very strong hints of a very important cargo. Well, technically they’re not twins, but they’re totally twins. Anyway. Important cargo. There had been some hemming and hawing about whether it was a trap, Shiro had been cautious, as always, but in the end, they’d gone for it.

The cargo was this giant pod that was pretty much a portable lab-or-something, like this whole lab-or-something pod _thing_ that could be swapped between ships, and Pidge couldn’t get any readings from the outside, and they were under fire, so they just cracked it as fast as they could, and—

 

* * *

 

Shiro’s had his doubts about this mission. It’s a little _too_ obvious. If Lotor was still running things, he’d never have authorized the combat drop—every straight line to Lotor is a trap, he’d learned that from Keith, and he’s still not sure their shaky and highly conditional alliance doesn’t count as a straight line—but Zarkon is often simplistic. Zarkon could, of course, afford to be simplistic when he had that much brute force at his disposal. Still. In they’d gone.

Something tightens in Shiro’s gut when he sees the lab pod, a trickle of unease. He shoves it aside because in that moment, it’s more important to put his shield over Pidge as she works on the locks, then take out the drone who’s got a clear shot on Allura, then give Lance cover as he falls in. Nobody notices the faltering in his breath. Nobody asks. There are more drones than there are variables to calculate in aborting the mission on a gut feeling, and then Pidge says, “We’re in,” and they’re in.

They tumble through and drop the door shut behind them.

It’s dark. The walls are threaded with purple light. There’s a smell, thick and a little sweaty, that Shiro can’t put his finger on, but it makes his blood run cold. He holds up a hand for caution, forms up the team. They’ve lost coms to the castle; Pidge bangs her head against that for a moment, then turns to tactical prep, frowning over her screens.

“I…can’t get a clear read on the security measures,” Pidge whispers. “None of the standard ones, at any rate. There are biorhythms—” She stops, eyes widening. “Human biorhythms,” she breathes. “Dozens of them.”

“But—but how?” Lance blurts, blanching. “Did they take Earth? W-we’d know if they’d taken Earth, right? Allura—we’d know, right?”

“We’ve always been monitoring it as best as we can,” Allura says, hiding the unease in her voice _almost_ flawlessly.

“The Garrison could’ve,” Hunk starts, then stops. “But they don’t have FTL. U-unless another mission was captured since we left…”

Something’s pounding in the back of Shiro’s head as they inch down the hall, and form up around a door, and snap the muzzles of their bayards up to cover it as soon as Pidge digitally pries it open. But it’s nothing concrete. No memory he can analyze and use. Just. A goddamn bad feeling about this.

Inside that door, it’s dark, and very cold. The smell redoubles, with an edge of rot, and hits Shiro like a hammer.

Pidge gets the lights on.

It’s some sort of storage area. Refrigerated, probably. Busy, lots of cover and hiding spots. No motion.

Then Shiro parses what the first thing lying near the door is.

It’s.

Shiro.

Dead and blue, ice crystals in his hair, two human hands clawed in agony and his eyes wide open, like he’d died screaming.

On top of him is. Shiro. Limbless.

“Wha,” somebody beside him breathes.

A rack of something that looks like cryo pods lines one wall: a skeleton, a muscled skeleton, a muscled skeleton with eyeballs, Shiro with half his skin missing, Shiro, Shiro, Shiro, Shiro, empties. Another pile of corpses: Shiros. A head on a crate: Shiro. A chart on the wall: a diagram of all of Shiro’s scars, neatly labeled in Galran. Publicity stills from their shows, cropped to focus on Shiro. A rack of metal arms, just Shiro’s size.

Shiro’s mind goes lavender-white and he reels a step backwards. Two. Allura’s head snaps around as she stares at him, doubt creeping across her face, then betrayal. Lance manages to take a breath and then spends it all shrieking “what the fuck, what the fuuuck, what the FUCK?”

Hunk crumples to his knees and retches like he hasn’t in months.

Pidge keeps her cool long enough to shout, “Guys. _Guys!_ There’s still _biorhythms._ ”

It’s not enough warning before a hand locks around Shiro’s throat like a vise.

He looks into his own eyes as his vision blurs. Combat breaks out, swift and brutal, and Shiro can’t even focus on it, can’t croak out an order, can’t do the last thing he _needs_ to do, because he can’t breathe, because the man holding him has two metal arms and no white streak in his hair and no scar and his eyes glow yellow, but it’s still _him_. It’s still the face he remembers from old photographs from before Kerberos. It’s still—

“Then who,” he mouths, voiceless, “am I…?”

 

* * *

 

“ _Fight_ them!” Allura barks, and sends the blue energy arc of her whip bone-deep into a yellow-eyed Shiro’s chest. Beside her, Lance gives a strangled sort of yelp. “They’re not Shiro!” Her eyes are burning hot. Shiro’s red lifeblood splatters across her greaves and the world swims slightly before she manages to focus on the next one. “None of them are Shiro! He never—he never came back from fighting Zarkon at all—I should have realized, I should have _known!_ ”

“No!” Lance shouts. “You don’t know—you don’t know he’s not—dammit, Allura, they’re killing him too—!”

Hunk’s straight-up frozen. Lance refuses to kill them, trying to kneecap them or stun them, tears fogging up his visor. Pidge has gone to ground, sheltering in a cave of five discarded Shiro corpses and desperately trying to pull down information, face white and hands trembling. Only Allura’s fighting all out, burning revulsion in her gut like she’s never felt. It’s not—it’s not because of their faces, the intimately familiar choked-back grunts of pain as she scores hits, it’s not that, she swears, it’s not that. They bleed red, not pink, it’s no more viscerally revolting than Galra blood. It’s fine. She doesn’t have a choice. They’re the enemy.

The Shiro in black paladin armor hits the deck, choked out, and Hunk finally stirs, dragging him close to shield him. “Hey—hey Shiro, it’s still you, buddy right? C’mon, breathe easy, wake up, we’re gonna get out of this…”

“Don’t touch him!” Allura snaps.

“Uhhh,” Lance says, like he’s trying to have an opinion.

Pidge gives one short, sharp yelp, and there’s a scuffle from her corpse cave.

“And _fight_ , Lance!” Allura _throws_ one of the Shiros bodily across the room, and he cracks against the purple-black wall of the lab with a groan. “Are you a paladin or not?”

“No, different uhhh, druids uhhh, fuck, Allura, _dru! Ids!_ ” Lance is backpedaling, pulling his rifle up to headshot level.

The shadows down the hall, behind an all-flesh Shiro with long and ragged dark hair, come to life with cloaks and masks.

The fight does not last long after that. It’s—humiliating, really. A pack of Galra guards with a few druids would be no more dangerous, but put forth a stolen face and the whole team becomes cowering children. Allura fights like a demon, mind white and bayard a razor whirlwind, and it takes three druids and five Shiros to beat her down once they’ve finally subdued the others.

As the world blurs around the edges, six hundred pounds of muscle on top of her battered armor, Allura sees one of the Shiros stoop to pull the helmet off his so-called paladin brother.

“Releasing the jamming,” one of the druids intones.

_The jamming._ If she can get through! “Coran!” Allura shrieks. “Coran, it’s an emergency—”

Her helmet’s gone. They already tore it off. Sweat-drenched locks of hair brush her cheek instead of her mic. If anyone could help, it would be Pidge—no, she’s limp over a Shiro’s shoulder, out cold.

Another Shiro settles the black paladin’s helmet on his head, long thick black hair sticking out from under it. “Coran. It’s Shiro. Thank god I got through, there’s been a lot of interference.” There’s a goodly amount of simulated crackling. Allura can dimly hear, through the pounding in her ears, Coran’s muffled voice, and she screams in rage and frustration through clenched teeth. “She’s been hit—it’s not serious, she’ll pull through,” Shiro says after a moment.

Coran had _heard_ that. He’d _fussed_. “Don’t li—” Allura shouts.

A metal hand closes up her jaw.

“I can’t explain everything,” the false Shiro plows on, “but they’re scanning for the castle. Coran, you need to hide. Get behind the second moon of the system, it’s laced with an alloy that interferes with their scanners. Shut down as many nonessential systems as you can, minimize your power consumption…”

Allura struggles, muffled, as the false Shiro orders Coran to become a sitting duck. Then the ancient, gold-trimmed hem of a familiar robe drags by her face, and she freezes, heart sinking even further.

The Shiro in black armor takes a few muzzy breaths, and his face as he comes back to consciousness is sheet white, choked in terror and shock.

“Project Kuron is clear to advance to phase four,” Haggar says with low, black satisfaction. “Jettison the lions for pickup and prepare for hyperspace jump.”

“I’m…sorry…” Shiro whispers.

Allura’s vision goes black.


	2. The Garlic Code

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should've posted this as M rather than T for the start, like I legit think I grabbed the wrong dropdown by mistake, so let me bump that up now, sorry.
> 
> First chapter was short. Rest will probably be more like this.

 

**CHAPTER 2 - THE GARLIC CODE**

 

Lance is really, really wishing right now that he’d bothered to put on more than boxers and a tank top beneath his underarmor that morning. Because boxers and a tank top are a) cold in a freaking empty metal box of a Galra cell, b) show off all the bruises from being captured and manhandled by a bunch of clones of his flight commander, c) make him feel really kind of exposed while being manhandled by said bunch of clones of his flight commander, like seriously, they’re boxers, his dick might’ve slipped out, and d) have smiley faces on them.

Pidge and Hunk wear the standard-issue thin space long-johns like normal people— _seriously, dude_ , Hunk had said once, _how do you not get pinched to all hell in that shirt_ , and Lance hadn’t really had a good answer to that, maybe he’s just too damn skinny _for_ anything _to_ get pinched—so they’re, at least, not freezing or entirely humiliated, but nobody is exactly, well, chipper.

Nobody has any idea how long it’s been, where Allura is and whether she’s still alive, where Coran and the Castle are and whether they’re still unexploded, or where Shiro is and whether he was ever Shiro. Also Pidge keeps tapping on the wall.

“Pidge,” Lance squawks, “what’re you even _doing_ it’s going to drive me nuts.”

“Sending a message,” Pidge mutters from her corner. She’s claimed that corner for ages now, after going over every inch of their cell. Knees under her chin, one arm wrapped around them, the other rapping on one particular spot of the wall. Sharp, rhythmic, intricate. Lance has always sucked at Morse code.

“S O S V O L T R O N,” Hunk spells out contemplatively, without moving. He’s flat on his back staring at the ceiling, head pillowed on his arms. “D O N T T R U S T B L A C K.” A sick silence hangs for a moment before Hunk adds, “Why there though?”

“Exhaust conduit,” Pidge says.

“Ohh, so you’re hoping the vibrations will pass on through their wake,” Hunk says.

“To who,” Lance groans. “We jumped away from Coran and the Castle and he can’t catch up without Allura and your wonder twin’s with them. Keith and the Purple Ninjas are all off infiltrating their supply line or whatever they’re calling it these days, and if they pull that off, Keith and the Purple Ninjas are going to be his new _band name_ because we’ll all be _dead_. So Lotor could still make himself useful again I guess? Does Lotor even know Morse code?”

“And the rebellion has a lot of ears!” Pidge snaps. “I should know because I found Matt at one of their listening stations after deciphering a code at his _grave_ so it’s never too late to send out a message.” She curls a little tighter in her corner, not even breaking rhythm. “I _have_ to.”

“His…grave?” Hunk echoes, rolling over to blink at her.

“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Pidge bites out into her knees.

 

* * *

 

Haggar is being very, very careful with her this time.

Which is to say, Allura is in a shockingly mundane dungeon, strapped to a shockingly heavy chair with shockingly heavy restraints. The druids hang back. There’s a circle painted on the floor, and the hems of their robes don’t so much as scuff it. Haggar, Altean and resourceful, has even scraped up a drug which muddles with her control over her cells, so she can’t shapeshift her way free.

But now, along with the druids who are doing mysterious things at consoles that Allura can’t even begin to guess at, Haggar’s accompanied by two of her pet clones, flanking her as she skulks in to visit.

“Not you,” she says, waving a dismissive claw at one clone with burning yellow eyes. He’s got pure dark hair, thick to his shoulders, not Shiro’s close-cropped style, and Allura’s pretty sure he’s the one that called Coran. He’s got a swaggering arrogance in his shoulders, a hunger in his jaw, two flesh arms that ripple with raw power. If she squints, she can almost forget who he looks like. “She’ll rip the quintessence from your bones. Go see to the others.”

Not him. Then—the other one. He’s standing at watchful attention, arms folded across his chest, and the posture’s achingly familiar. There’s a heavy scar over the bridge of his nose, a white lock, trimmed hair. He wears a sleek suit of purple and black, probably subtly armored, high-collared, leaving his metal right arm bare.

“Soften her up,” Haggar says. “Don’t be deceived by her pretty face. She can take as much as any Galra commander.”

Allura watches him pace inside the circle and refuses to let him see her squirm or test her restraints. He’s—alarmingly tall, when she’s sitting like this. She feels alarmingly vulnerable, stripped down to her plain cloth undersuit. But she keeps her chin high, puts on her most commanding voice. “Who are you?”

“I’m asking the questions here,” he says in that oh-so-familiar voice, cold and flat.

“Of course you are.” She gives an _almost_ diplomatic smile, even if everyone in the room is perfectly aware how hollow it is. “But trade must be an equal exchange, you see. It took three of your, ah, less controlled brothers—” she nods at the doors already closed behind the yellow eyed Shiro “—to even get me into these restraints. You could save yourself a good deal of time and effort.”

He unfolds his arms. Just that, with the metal hand catching the light, is a subtle, almost artistic threat. There’s no familiarity in his gaze. No recognition. And yet there’s a calculating caution that feels so very Shiro. So very _not_ Galra. Allura clenches her jaw for focus through all the worry and pain, because she needs to know how badly Voltron and the entire alliance has been compromised. Even if—no, one step at a time. Get the truth. Win her freedom. Take it from there.

“Are you making an offer?” he asks, cocking his head to one side, and then starts circling her. She’s never had Shiro’s menace focused on her, the danger that lurks in him—she’s perfectly aware of it, it’s part of what made him an excellent warrior, but it’s hard to judge whether it’s the _same_ menace, whether this is a man she knew. Or thought she knew. “None of us have time to play games that will bear no fruit,” he adds, almost civilly. “I’ll warn you now, I won’t play for anything less than the location of a strategically relevant rebel or Blade installation at the moment. Hm. Or perhaps an encryption code, that would do as well.”

Curses. The fastest types of intelligence to verify. At the very least, she couldn’t give empty space for a location—a moon could stall them a little, she hopes, and she’s _not_ giving anything real. She gives him a gracious nod. “I understand. And under the circumstances, you’ll understand if I make a low offer. A listening post. Barely manned, but a key point in the intelligence network.”

He’s completed the circle, back to face her, and that earns a quirk of his eyebrow, unimpressed. “For what?”

“Oh, I know I can’t ask much. Opening bids, and all.” She has one final moment to rummage frantically, while keeping her face a pleasant mask, and then she asks, “Does the name Kaltenecker mean anything to you?”

He blinks twice, brow furrowing. Behind him, Haggar lifts her head slightly.

Allura _vividly_ remembers Lance’s saga of The Time He Made Shiro Milk The Cow And He Didn’t Like It, as part of his grander saga of Milk Is Not Pee I Promise This Is How Cows Do, so that might be a tell if he didn’t know, right? At least that _this_ one—gods, there were just too many—

“No,” he says, frank and without comprehension. “I’ve answered. Your turn. The listening post.”

Allura puts on a face of graceful resignation, and reluctantly rattles off the first unoccupied moon in a plausible location she can think of.

“Wait,” Haggar says. One word, and the imposter stiffens, falls to attention, and waits. Somewhere a console beeps. “Come,” she says, and the imposter comes. And reads. And snorts.

“Poor choice, Princess,” he says, pacing back into her painted circle, absolutely unruffled. “The entire moon was destroyed during ion cannon testing not long ago.”

Allura wishes she could say she’d been ready for a metal fist driven casually into her ribs, but perhaps that’s not really a thing one can be ready for. She bites back as much of her wheezing cry as she can. “Ah. My mistake.” She struggles to straighten for a moment. They haven’t bothered to heal her much after the fight, and there’s only so much her own body can do. She’s still bone-sore, head pounding. “You, on the other hand, told me everything. You’re nothing but Haggar’s toy. You’ve never been a paladin of Voltron.”

There’s a thin line between his eyebrows, and she savors it, because it’s about all she can do right now. “I serve Haggar and the Empire.”

“So she’s never told you who she copied you from, did she?”

He almost, almost looks over his shoulder. Haggar’s lifted her chin, Allura can see, tension in her jaw, eyes glinting in the dark of her hood. A strange, heavy danger hangs in the air, and for a moment, Allura could swear this new imposter was almost afraid.

Then he turns back, grabs a fistful of Allura’s hair, and drags her head back, setting her scalp on fire. “It was interesting negotiating with you, Princess. But I think we need to get down to business.”

 

* * *

 

Time passes. Pidge talks about it. Pidge winds up unfolding the whole epic of How She Found Matt, and it is unanimously agreed upon that Pidge is badass and like totally a noir space detective now and they’re getting her a cool detective hat next time they’re at the space mall. Stomachs growl. Everybody pretends their heads don’t come up like cornered animals every time footsteps pass their door, but, well, they do.

“Oh quiznaaaaaaaak,” Lance groans, without thinking, in a jolt of head to toes despair, after a lingering silence that gives his thoughts _plenty_ of time to go bad places. “I don’t wanna die a virgin.”

“Are we _really_ doing this,” Pidge grumbles.

Hunk sits bolt upright, mouth slack. “Wait, you’re a virgin?”

Lance freezes.

Fuck fuck fuck he fucked up why did he _admit_ that shit? Because of a stray thought? Oh god, he isn’t going to last under torture. They’re all doomed. _Doomed_.

“I uh uh uh well uh with humans?”

“Think about it, Hunk,” Pidge says. “Have you ever actually seen Lance’s lines _work_?”

Hunk furrows his brow and scratches his chin with great solemnity. “That’s true. That’s very compelling evidence, science friend.”

Lance puts his face between his knees and makes sad Chewbacca noises.

“Oh, man,” Hunk says, “this is, like, encouraging though. I didn’t actually think we were on the same page.”

“Glad I could help,” Lance says mournfully in his best customer service voice. “Well, I guess that answers the question of whether you’ve hit home base with a rock.”

“Aaagghhhh don’t start,” Hunk groans.

“Okay,” Lance blurts, “stupidest thing you’ve done because of a crush, lightning round, because otherwise I’m gonna start thinking about how everything is terrible again.”

“You mean besides getting cuffed to a tree while she flew away with your lion?” Pidge says.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m gonna win the lightning round.” Lance sticks his nose in the air.

“I did give a girl a banana and then panic and run away once?” Hunk says.

“A banana,” Pidge says, slot-eyed.

“It was what I had and her mom had forgotten to pack her dessert and I’d had a crush on her like the entire year, okay?”

“Okay, but that’s cute,” Lance says. “Seriously. You stress-bake _and_ you give good backrubs, you’re gonna make some rock a wonderful wife one day.”

“I hate you,” Hunk groans fondly.

“Piiiidge,” Lance says.

She sticks out her tongue and keeps tapping.

“Dish!”

“Ugh, _look_ , that would’ve required anybody besides my family to say anything other than fuck off nerd to me _ever._ ”

There’s one horribly awkward beat of silence, filled only by Pidge’s SOS and Hunk’s puppy eyes of sympathy, before Lance says, “Their freaking loss. I mean, sure, you _are_ a huge nerd, but you’re also a super-cool nerd.”

“…thanks,” Pidge admits after a moment. “I think.” She’s silent for another moment, then says, “Do guys do that thing to each other where they tell you that there’s this one cool kid who’s secretly really into you and you should ask them out and it turns out to be this whole stupid setup so they can giggle at you from the corner while you get the ew gross no how dare you even think you’re allowed to speak to me turndown?”

“ _Jesus_ , no,” Lance hisses. “That’s a dick move.”

“Nah, guys just stick to, like, beating you up and calling you names,” Hunk says. “We’re much less creative.”

“If anybody ever used me for that setup I’d just ask her out,” Lance says magnanimously.

“What, even if you weren’t into her?” Pidge says dourly, raising an eyebrow.

“One, all girls are goddesses, two, it saves her face, and three, I remember when somebody did that to my little sister and she cried every day before school for like a week, so yes.”

Pidge eyes him for a moment, still holding to her rhythm against the wall, and then shrugs. “Well, I guess that counts as the stupidest thing. Though I didn’t even _actually_ have a crush on him.”

“Did you…have any friends?” Hunk asks a little carefully. “Is that why you and Matt are so close?”

“Holts against the world,” Pidge says with a sharp, lopsided smile. “That’s how it’s always been.” She’s quiet for a moment, then adds, “You guys…are pretty much my first friends. So I’m not gonna let this be the end of us. I’ll find a—”

She falls silent, stops her code mid-letter.

Footsteps.

Footsteps getting closer. And stopping this time.

The cell door opens.

It’s one of the Shiros. Searing yellow eyes, long all-black hair. He seems—bigger than Shiro. Maybe it’s just the whole looming in a cell door thing. Or his swagger. Or his space assault rifle which he has no trigger discipline with. Two of his equally creepy yellow-eyed twins melt out of the hallway to flank him.

“Okay, start talking,” Lance says manfully, getting his legs under him. It’s not a huge cell. Maybe he could spring, close the distance. “Where’s Allura?”

“Strapped to a chair and screaming,” the not-Shiro says flatly, pulling his rifle up to cover the room. “Let me make one thing clear. You’re a lot more disposable than your princess. Especially you two boys. And nobody will care if I take all your limbs off.” The last is aimed at Pidge, who freezes, what little color she has draining from her face. “Fat, skinny, one of you two is going to walk out this door with us in the next five seconds, or I shoot one of you in the head.”

“Wait, what d’you mean about Pidge,” Lance blurts, not at all manfully at this point.

“Four,” not-Shiro counts. “Three.”

Lance opens his mouth to choke out a yes through his strangling fear.

“I’m coming,” Hunk growls, jaw set, rolling to his feet. “I’m coming, hold your damn horses.”

“Hunk!” Lance yelps. “Wait, I—”

Not-Shiro counts two. Hunk looks over his shoulder for a brief moment and gives Lance a bright, lopsided grin. Lance feels his stomach drop to his toes.

One of the other yellow-eyed clones reaches out a hand, grabs Hunk by the elbow, and spins him around to throw him against the wall and cuff him. He moves _Hunk_ like a rag doll, and both his hands look perfectly fleshy. Shit.

It’s over in a second. They drag Hunk out. The door slams closed before Lance can even get to his feet.

Pidge makes one thin whine, curls up very tight, and buries her face in her knees. Lance beats on the door until his hands hurt, cursing a blue streak. Admittedly, that doesn’t take long. It’s metal.

The footsteps fade.

Lance slides down to a crouch, shaking. Shit. He shouldn’t have let Hunk take that. He should’ve jumped. Right away. No hesitation. He _knows_ he’s the spare. Why does Hunk have to be so stupidly heroic at like the weirdest times?

And what the hell had they meant about Pidge being less disposable—hell, Lance isn’t even sure he can _think_ about that, because all the possible answers are _creepy as fuck._

“Do you think…” he mutters eventually.

“He’ll come back,” Pidge says, without lifting her head from her knees. “If they really wanted to kill us, we’d be dead already.”

“Of _course_ he’ll come back,” Lance agrees, slightly desperate. “We always come back. Right?”

Somewhere down the hall, a door slides open. A scream echoes. The door slams.

“Right?” Lance whispers.

“Right,” Pidge says, with practically Shiro levels of deadly determination.

The silence is kind of terrible, maybe worse than the screaming.

“Are…are you okay?” Lance asks quietly, and kind of regrets it the moment it comes out of his mouth, because Jesus fucking Christ, of course she isn’t okay.

She gives one full-body shudder, and instead of answering, unfolds one hand and finds her spot on the wall. _Taptaptap_. _Tap tap tap. Taptaptap._ The whole sequence. Again.

“Do you think,” Lance asks finally, because it’s been burning him up, and he’s fresh out of funny. Like Hunk being dragged off drained his funny meter to zero, and now it’s got one of those stupid recharge timers like a phone game. He’s not even sure it _will_ recharge. “Do you think we’ve been flying with the real deal?”

 _Tap taptap. Tap tap tap. Tap ta. Tap._ “I don’t know,” she says quietly. “I just—we don’t know enough, one way or another.”

“We’d—we’d know, right? I mean, we worked with him for months, yeah? He felt right, he was the same old Shiro—hey, could a clone even _have_ Shiro’s memories? Like he knew us! He knew all the little stuff.”

 _Tap. Ta tap ta. Taptap tap. Taptaptap. Tap._ “Maybe the Galra have some way of transferring memories. We don’t _know_ what Haggar can do. Or maybe…” Her voice gets very small. “Maybe the real Shiro never came back from the arena at all.”

“Shit,” Lance breathes. It’s the kind of thought that makes him feel like he’s just ejected into zero-g, spinning ass over teakettle. “Pidge.”

“Look. He’s. He’s _Shiro_. I don’t want to doubt him either, but we can’t afford not to.”

“Pidge?”

“Yeah?”

“You kinda scare me sometimes.”

_Tap taptaptap. Ta tap taptap. Ta tap. Tap ta tap ta. Tap ta tap._

 

* * *

 

Shiro’s clone gets down to business.

By the time Haggar calls him off, Allura’s fighting hard to not slump nerveless in her chair. Blood burbles in her nose every time she breathes. Her hair’s a ragged mess, clumps stuck to her face with blood and sweat, and there’s some small, inane part of her mind that’s caught up fussing about how long it’s going to take to comb it all out. A long soak. Conditioner. She could get the mice to help her. Once they get out of here. There’s no option besides getting out of here.

Her hair will be easier to fix than her ribs. Or the cold calculation in those familiar gray eyes, or the ever-lingering doubt about whether a clone and spy had joined Voltron, or the rage. _Oh_ , the rage. It’s like a chasm has opened right down to the molten core of her. The burning anger she thought she’d faced and set aside when Keith’s heritage had come to light. She could laugh at herself. Not so easily set aside. She isn’t even sure she _wants_ to right now. It keeps her jaw tight, her will focused through the crushing pain of the clone’s fists.

By the time Haggar calls him off, Allura hasn’t given him the satisfaction of a scream.

He’s off balance, she can tell. He shakes her blood off his metal knuckles with tension in his jaw and keeps a wary eye on Haggar, like he isn’t sure where he stands. Good. Even a little doubt seeded is satisfying payback for the pain he’d dished out.

“Ma’am,” he says, carefully.

“Did you really think you’d be able to do more than soften her up,” Haggar says dismissively.

Something in his jaw twitches, and he circles to one of the consoles, taps in a code.

The video feed pops up large enough to cover half the room, a transparent projection, and Allura hears the gutwrenching scream before she even registers what she’s seeing.

It’s Hunk, strapped to a wall. The wall’s a machine. The straps glow with awful purple light. In them, he spasms and screams, and a druid works a control panel, and the yellow-eyed long-haired clone watches, and Allura bites her tongue against a dry sob, heart aching.

The searing light fades. Hunk wheezes for air, squares his jaw, and says, voice burbling, “so then.” And spits out blood. “So _then_ you grab a whole head of garlic, okay, do you purple fuckers know what garlic is, no, you are not so blessed, I can tell. You’d be stronger with garlic. Garlic is a sacred element. Garlic is the most important part of the Coalition. Next to salt. Grab a whole head of garlic, slice that bad boy in half, don’t even bother peeling it, and rub the raw edge down along your roasting pan. Bottom, sides, all round the short ribs, everywhere. Garlic it up. You can toss the top in too, more flavor for more fuss, you’ll be herding up bits of garlic through the whole thing after that though. Either way you’re gonna—Jesus, no, don’tturnthatthingbackonPLEASE, I am trying to tell you something _important_ you goatsucker! You’re gonna—need a sieve—later!” His voice cracks back into screams, sweat soaking his headband.

“Do you think it’s some kind of code?” asks the other clone leaning against the wall, barely visible at one edge of the camera’s frame, yellow eyes watching warily.

“We need clarity,” grates out the druid at the controls, between Hunk’s howls.

Allura feels her nails digging into her palms so hard she’s bleeding, and prays, _prays_ that they’re both foolish enough to misread her horrified sympathy as horrified betrayal. Bless Hunk’s resourcefulness. Let them chase after garlic. Let them keep him alive. “Coward,” she hisses under her breath, putting every ounce of her rage at the false Shiro into it.

“There is nothing you can do to stop me from learning everything there is to learn,” Haggar says flatly. “You have already been betrayed. The rebellion is dead.”

Allura grits her teeth against a roil of nauseating dread. No more room for doubt, then. Shiro— _their_ Shiro belongs to the enemy. Shiro who knows the full tactical capability of the current paladins and the Castle, every member world of the Coalition, how the Blade of Marmora cloaks their bases, the identities of more than a few of them right up to Keith and Kolivan. He doesn’t know as much about the inner workings of the other rebels, unless Matt’s told him more than she knows. He doesn’t know _everything_ about the Blade—nobody does, not even Kolivan. But even with that, there is no more compromising a leak, not even herself.

“You cannot kill hope,” Allura whispers, fervent. “You cannot kill freedom. You cannot kill what lives in the heart of every living being in this universe.”

She has to believe that. She _has_ to. The video’s still streaming. She wishes her voice could reach poor Hunk, scream cracking on a whimpering sob as they give him another moment to breathe.

“Prepare her for the ritual,” Haggar says, and turns her back on her.

Allura bites back a curse and makes one desperate, bone-rattling drag at her restraints with every ounce of strength she has.

Nothing budges.

“A sieve,” Hunk gasps, voice cracking, tinny over the monitor. “And tomato paste. Spoonful or two, whatever. Make sure it gets—oh _shitting hell_ —right into the bottom of the pan—”

The clone picks up something from one corner and closes on her. His expression is unreadable, strangely abstracted, jaw tight. He’s holding—a soldier’s helmet? No, it’s heavier than the usual Galra issue.

He reaches out with his flesh hand and, almost gently, tugs the last of her hair down from her bun.

Then he rounds behind her, catches her jaw, and shoves the helmet down over her head. She struggles hard. Almost thinks for a second that she’s ducked it, but then he slams it down.

The world goes black.

“Cook it down.” Hunk spits out. “So it’s not—”

Then something whines against her ears, and Hunk’s voice cuts out, and there’s nothing but silence. She can’t hear Hunk; she can’t hear the clone’s breathing or the soft whirring of his arm. She can’t even hear her _own_ breathing, the creaks of her bones and muscles, the sound of her voice in her head. She _thinks_ her lips are moving. She _thinks_ she’s calling out.

Nothing but silence.

 

* * *

 

By the time they hear footsteps again again, Pidge has allowed Lance to curl up next to her, bumped side to side like cats, and she doesn’t look like she’s even realized that she’s leaning into him, so he’s certainly not going to point it out. It’s warm. And more dignified than clinging. The code she’s tapping out has almost become soothing.

This time they share a conspiratorial nod, and Pidge tightens her jaw and jerks her head and slides to her feet, padding up to stand next to the door. Lance mirrors her. They flank the door, digging their bare heels into the deck. The footsteps sound like maybe only two people, and there’s a strange dragging noise. Hunk, Lance thinks. If they’re lucky, they’ll have their hands full with him.

The door opens.

Lance and Pidge charge—and after barely a step they’re both bowled over by Hunk, because the clone in the hallway beyond is literally _flinging_ him into the cell like a very large limp rag. All three of them go down clamoring.

The door slams closed before they can even start picking themselves up.

“Hunk!” Lance blurts, scrabbling to untangle himself and kneel beside him. Pidge takes the other side, worry raw on her face. “Hunk, stay with me, man, stay with me.”

“Lance.” Hunk groans, slowly rolling over onto his back, chest heaving. “Pidge. Guys. Holy steaming pig shit that sucked. I couldn’t take it. I’m so sorry. I told them…every recipe…I know…”

Lance and Pidge blink at each over a few times over Hunk’s limp, ragged form.

“Oh god, man, how could you?” Lance says in mock horror, and picks up one of Hunk’s hands to squeeze.

“Every recipe?” Pidge scrubs at her eyes for immersion’s sake, and then squeezes Hunk’s other hand a little too late. “The Coalition is doomed.”

“Doooomed,” Lance groans in despair.

“I’m so sorry,” Hunk chokes again.

Finally they hear the feet leave the other side of the cell door.

“Shit shit quiznak coño shit,” Lance breathes, fervent. “Do you want to get up do you want to lie there what do you need.”

“Lying here is.” Hunk coughs. “About what I. I don’t think my legs work right now.” He coughs again. Pidge has two fingers on the side of his neck, then moves to lower one ear against his chest.

“Ssh,” she whispers. “Hunk, breathe as deep as you can.”

“Don’t wanna,” he mumbles, and does anyway. Lance has no idea what’s Pidge is on about, but Hunk’s not moving and he is _so_ not gonna make Pidge take off her shirt, so he strips off his tank top and starts cleaning up the blood. They’d beaten him up some. There are these purplish-red burns at his wrists and throat that look singularly ominous. Mostly he just sort of looks like shit, wrung out, like Han Solo after Vader’s electric table thingie.

“Okay, I don’t _think_ your lungs are damaged?” Pidge says after a few moments.

“Nah I’m. I just. I screamed a lot so I’m all scratchy, and I keep swallowing blood.” He groans and sticks out his tongue. “Not tasty.”

“Let’s get you on your side, that’ll help for that. Safer in general, really.”

It’s a coordinated effort. Lance settles cross-legged so Hunk can use his thigh as a pillow, and if Hunk gives a wretched little shudder and curls closer than expected, wrapping a big warm hand around Lance’s knee, well, it helps with the whole being in just his boxers in a cold cell thing. Pidge scoots back to her corner and starts up her signal again, but she doesn’t take her eyes off them.

Lance lets his arm settle around Hunk’s shoulders, and Hunk murmurs, “thanks, man,” and something hot and desperate wells up in Lance’s chest and he has to try very hard not to tear up for a moment.

“No, no I…shit, Hunk, I’m sorry. I should’ve. I should’ve stepped up.”

“Lance?” Hunk mumbles.

“Yeah?”

“Shut the hell up.”

“But—”

“No.” It’s almost a growl. Hunk squeezes Lance’s knee insistently. “Look. You know I’m a coward, you know I don’t like getting hurt, but I’m big, I can take it, and you’re.” He coughs heavily. “Faster than me. If anybody gets a chance to run, they take it, all right? Then find a way to get the rest of us out.”

Lance shivers, and maybe squeezes Hunk a little in return. “Jesus, Hunk, you’re not a coward, you’re brave as shit. I…damn it.” He scrubs his other hand over his face.

“Seconded,” Pidge says, voice very small. “Both. I second Hunk on any of us bolts if we can, and you’re the fastest, Lance. I second Lance on you not being a coward—”

The door slams open.

They all just about jump out of their skins—well, Hunk twitches—because this time there were no footsteps. No warning. No Shiros. Just two druids and Haggar herself.

Well, fuck.

Lance braces a hand against the deck, ready to start shit if the others are, because hey, nobody’s holding a gun to his head this time. Yet. Also he tries very very hard not to think about the fact that Zarkon’s witch, in the flesh, is staring down at him in only his boxers.

“We’ve wasted enough time,” Haggar grates out. “You, get the sample for the experimental batch. You, get what you can out of the idiot before finding another use for him.”

“The _idiot_?” Lance drawls over the icy fear pooling in his gut. “I’ll have you know, I only answer to loverboy and sharpshooter.”

“What sample,” Pidge mouthes in the corner of his eye, barely audible. Hunk is dragging himself up to sit, hands braced against the wall, breathing heavily with a surly focus in his eyes, and Lance helps him up, gathering his legs under himself. They trade a glance out of the corners of their eyes. Hunk has that clench to his battered jaw, that dangerous heaviness to his stare, that means he’s _very_ ready to start shit.

One of the druids vanishes.

And reappears right next to Pidge, holding what looks like the oversized evil purple cousin to a syringe.

Lance stops thinking. And lunges.

It’s chaos. Chaos that’s unfortunately very full of black lightning, and hell, these guys would hand Lance his ass in close quarters like these if he was in full armor and bayarded up, but he can’t _not_. Not when Pidge is actually, full-out, losing her shit. Pidge _never_ loses her shit, it’s actually almost freakier than Shiro or Allura losing their shit. But now she’s screaming with raw fear like he’s never heard. _Angry_ fear. She’s fighting like a demon, knocks the syringe out of the druid’s hands. “No, no, no no no don’t you DARE!”

Hunk and Lance are moving with unspoken, absolute agreement, and Lance makes a desperate dive to smash the syringe against the wall of the cell, and Hunk straight up grabs Pidge and slides her out the still-open door, right past Haggar’s robes like a hockey puck. Pidge rolls with it, pushing off the opposite wall and springing to her feet, running like hell.

But goalies can’t teleport. _Fucking_ druids. _Fucking_ Haggar.

Hunk goes down first, already weak, right in Haggar’s blast zone. All she needs to do is lift a hand and slam him against the wall with a quick bolt of darkness, and he groans and doesn’t move. Lance _thinks_ he’s still breathing. Lance _has_ to think he’s still breathing, because he doesn’t have time to check. He dodges one blast, two, by the skin of his teeth, dives out the door, bolts after Pidge roiling with guilt.

Just in time to see Shiro’s metal arm pluck her out of mid-step like a stray cat.

He’s got her by the throat, at arm’s length, bare kicking heels two feet off the ground. She’s got both hands wrapped around his unyielding wrist, tugging and twisting, face a snarl of naked horror, but there’s not a damn thing she can do. There’s a smear of pink on the steely knuckles that makes Lance’s blood run cold for no reason he can name.

“Don’t kill the subject,” Haggar says dismissively, and Lance realizes that her voice is coming from _right beside him_. He’s frozen in horror. Cold, implacable claws are prying the syringe-thing out of his hand.

Shiro—their Shiro? He looks right, he’s got the right haircut and the right amount of cyborg and the right scar and the right eyes, even if he’s in purple-black armor and doesn’t seem to give a single fuck—no, he can’t be their Shiro, he can’t _possibly_ be that good an actor, he gives fucks, right? Their Shiro gives fucks and this Shiro doesn’t give fucks and Lance plain old _is_ fucked and he has a few spare, inane seconds to run through this scientific calculation of fucks as Haggar glides over and rolls up one of Pidge’s sleeves.

Before one of the druids slams Lance with lightning from behind and everything goes red with pain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PS: [Hunk's recipe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnxLau7m600&vl=en). I've made it, it's delish.


	3. Now Touring

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who is trying to get her affairs in order before season 5 drops? This nerd. I don't expect to have it finished by March, but I'm hoping to at least knock out chapter 4 before then, maybe more.

 

**CHAPTER 3 - NOW TOURING**

 

**_You are not the human called Takashi Shirogane._ **

He’s looking at his own severed head in this dim purple light.

He isn’t sure how long he’s been looking at his own severed head.

It wasn’t a clean blow. Ragged bits of flesh frozen onto the metal crate beneath. Nobody had closed his eyes. One of them’s burst, face sagging a little on that side, smear of something down his cheek.

This had been—another copy of him. He can’t have lived long. Maybe he’d died here, maybe he never even left this lab. There’s no way to _know_. Whether he’d even had a name. How long he’d lived until somebody had hacked off his head and left it in a storage fridge. Where the rest of him was. Whether he’d struggled, or dreamed, or thought of himself as a person…

His hair is shot through with white, a scatter, not a single forelock. He doesn’t have a scar over the bridge of his nose, but there are three half-healed lines like claws down one cheek, pink and spattered with ice crystals in the dim light.

This had been—another copy of him—except not—not of _him_. He wasn’t the original. Not if what Haggar told him before locking him in here, alone and shivering, was true. He doesn’t want to believe it, _god_ he doesn’t want to. He _wants_ to be Shiro, because oh, it’s wretchedly selfish, but he wants to know that he is a person, born of his parents, raised on Earth, with a right to be a member of Voltron.

He can’t shake the horrid certainty that he isn’t.

**_You are no less a puppet than the rest of this discarded meat._ **

He can’t look at the one with no limbs.

Every once in a while his eyes track over, and he whines behind his teeth, and looks away, sweat prickling ice-cold on his skin. He’d had those nightmares so many times. Back on the druids’ table, not even strapped down because they didn’t _need_ to, no legs to run, no arms to fight back, a lump of flesh with his mind still trapped—

It’s like he’s caught in a loop. His eyes track over. The half-body’s face-down on top of another, intact corpse. He isn’t sure whether the limbs had been taken off before or after he’d died. He isn’t sure whether one of him had lived that nightmare. But there are rings of metal round the short stumps of his thighs, so probably—probably more experiments with replacing limbs—he’d probably been alive—

He feels his eyes prickle, and looks away, and knows that he’s weak, and struggles anyway.

**_And your time to dance is over._ **

He can’t activate his arm. A clamp, a suppressor, like the ones the rebels had—how had they had it, how had they known, why was it the only clamp they had, why is he wondering about that _now?_ Far too late to seriously wonder whether his escape had been staged. Stupid. Stumbling through those hallways, sinuses full of alien antiseptic and the too-rich meaty smell of growth fluid and cold dead flesh—hallucinating himself—

He looks at the pods along the wall. The ones that have finished their growth cycle. Clones floating oblivious in their tanks, unscarred, intact. Black hair a few inches long waving in the purple fluid. Almost—almost soothing. Not to the existential panic like ice in his belly. But at least—at least they haven’t suffered yet.

He tears his eyes off the half-grown ones, strings of nerves and muscle.

He wonders if they dream.

Ice clings to his eyelashes. Ice prickles at his cheeks, builds up around the rim of the muzzle that cinches his jaw shut.

**_You will not move or speak again._ **

He’s shivering by now, violently, and the pain in his shoulders has built to something like bone-deep magma, spreading down his back and sides in lances of dull fire, forcing little muffled whines out between his clenched teeth every time he breathes.

He tests the shackles, again, systematically. No weak points, no give to do anything more than writhe in vain. The attachment point above his head, chaining his wrists to the ceiling to string him up like a side of beef, is rock solid. The attachment point on the floor, linked to his trembling, dangling legs so that he can’t swing up and get leverage, is rock solid. He can barely even see them. Nothing’s changed, except that every time he struggles, he’s weaker.

He should conserve his energy, he thinks. Keep his head down. Pace himself until something changes. It’s how he survived some of that year, in those shards of memory. If those even were his memories.

He can’t afford to cry. He can’t afford nausea. So easy to choke himself and die, gagged like this.

Every time the witch’s words echo through his ringing skull, there’s some small part of him that thinks that might be for the best.

**_I shall return for you in due time._ **

He can't stop thinking about what she said. He can't get it out of his head. Like one of those songs that never goes away, but worse, so much worse.

Is it some sort of spell? Some Altean mind trick? Rattling around in his skull like a stray memory, bubbles in purple fluid, some new horror that hasn't quite surfaced, unfurled, cracked open and spilled over his brain—it crackles, it hisses, there's the stink of ozone and black magic somewhere under the chill of frozen meat, under his cold sweat. Rattling—no, that's the cuffs on his ankles, rattling against each other as he shivers so hard his bones ache—

There's a strange, muffled noise echoing off the walls, incomprehensible, and it takes him far too long to realize that it's his own voice, stripped down to wordless groans. _Let me out. Please god let me out. Let me out of here. I'm not—I'm Shiro—_

**_And when I do, I shall take the illusion that is your mind apart, piece by piece._ **

—Shiro stumbling nerveless down the hallway, flinching in the light—bubbles in a syringe—fluid rising—his own face—

No. No. He'd been hallucinating. He _must_ have been hallucinating. Ulaz vanishing. Pain spiking through his temple. _Operation Kuron._ Head pounding as another man wearing his face strangled him with steel hands. _Phase—four? One?_

He's real. He's real, he _has_ to believe he's _real_ , Haggar is going to come back for him and he'll wait for an opening and he'll break free. He can't afford to think of anything else. He's not going to go insane here, with her words ripping his mind apart, spilling out— _growth fluid_ —the Black Lion hadn't trusted him—

This is impossible, he tells himself. A body could be grown, scars and modifications duplicated, but you can't clone a _mind_. You can't clone memories. She's lying. Science, remember the science. His entire self can't possibly be an illusion. She's lying. He can't let this get to him. He can't panic. He's _Shiro_. He's the Black Paladin. Shiro doesn't panic.

_Let me out please!_

Shiro would never betray—

**_And learn everything you know about the rebellion and Voltron._ **

 

* * *

 

Lance doesn’t lose consciousness _exactly_. It’s more like there’s this gray stretch where his eyes won’t focus properly and his ears won’t stop ringing and he can’t quite move because his nerves are crackling fire and his legs keep spasming. And also because he’s cuffed and being dragged by a creepy yellow-eyed Shiro, bare legs scraping over the deck plates as he twitches. He’s pretty sure the Shiro and the druid are talking, but he can’t tell about what, and he’s scared it’s about him. Shit, he’s scared. About everything. He doesn’t know where they’re taking him and he doesn’t know what they’re going to do and he should be running. Hunk got hurt so he could run. He might be making little whimpering noises, he isn’t quite sure.

He keeps hoping he’ll wake up.

He doesn’t.

He doesn’t, and the room they take him to doesn’t look like a interrogation room or whatever, it looks like a surgical bay.

He tries to run even though his nerves are still smoldering, and he’s probably screaming, but they grab him. They grab him and he struggles so hard he thinks he’s going to throw up and they stretch him out on the slab and strap him down and some part of his brain is stuck wondering if he’s going to die on this thing. If he’ll never get up again.

The ringing in his ears is finally dying down, so he hears snatches of words.

_…not even the Champion stock survived quadrilateral…_

_…I’ve been sent to interrogate him before you…_

_…does she want you to redeem yourself since you didn’t break the Princess…_

_…we’ve explored brachial replacements, it’s time to move on…_

_…she’ll get what she needs from the Princess once she consumes her soul…_

Lance makes some garbled noise of horror and strains at the straps until his blood pounds in his ears. There’s something hot prickling at his eyes. Allura, _Allura_ , he needs to get to her, he needs to help her…

The blurry ceiling slowly slides into focus. It’s awfully quiet, somehow, now that there aren’t church bells in his head. Mostly he’s hearing a lot of harsh panting, and raw mumbles of _no_ and _let me go_ and _Allura_ and, well, okay, that’s probably him.

“You should be shaking it off by now,” says a very familiar voice, calm and matter of fact, and for a moment, stupidly, Lance’s heart leaps.

It’s the Shiro who grabbed Pidge during their crappy escape attempt.

“Whehslura,” he manages, swallowing hard. “What’re you going to _do_ to her.”

“She’s not the one you should be worried about right now,” the scarily out-of-fucks Shiro says without much care. “The druids are curious about new human stock. They’ll probably try to keep you alive as long as they can.”

Lance whines between his teeth and struggles. In vain.

Scary-Shiro reaches out dispassionately and picks Lance’s bangs off his sweaty forehead with his pink-stained metal hand. “Though if you make too much trouble, they might cut out your tongue without replacing it. I’ve seen them do that to clone stock.”

“To…t-to _you_ , to people like you? Weren’t you…” Lance isn’t even sure how to finish that sentence. Angry? Sad? The real Shiro would be. Scared for his own hide, at least?

“There are penalties for disobedience,” scary-Shiro says, quite casually. Sky is blue, Pope is Catholic, you watch your clone’s tongue get cut out if he starts shit. Lance is hovering in some weird, watery place somewhere beyond _simple_ fear or horror; all his limbs are jelly and there’s something running down his face and yet he can almost, sort of, think, in a distant and unsettlingly calm way. “I thought you might appreciate a moment to talk while you’re still in one piece.”

“Hnnnmmm,” Lance says thoughtfully. Maybe they’re having a moment. Is this a moment?

“Tell me about the other paladins.”

Lance’s throat closes up. Shit. This isn’t a moment at _all_. Scary-Shiro almost had him. Trying to terrify him into blabbing, rather than beating it out of him? Fuck, it had almost worked. Fuck. He’s an _idiot_.

So Lance swallows hard, again, braces himself as best as he can, and drawls, “yup.”

Scary-Shiro pauses for just a moment, eyes narrowing. “Their names. Their roles within the team. Personally, not just tactically.”

“Yup.”

“I suggest you find somewhere to start, then. Perhaps the tallest, if you can’t decide.”

“Yup.”

“Let me make something clear,” scary-Shiro says, sounding mildly annoyed. “The witch has already begun her rituals. She’ll know everything soon enough. For all I know, it’s already done. I’m not asking you for information because it’s my job.”

“Yup, so you’re fucking with me for fun?” Lance blurts.

“Do I look like I’m having fun?” he asks dryly.

“No, you like never look like you’re having fun. Well, Shiro doesn’t. Are you Shiro? Was there a second Shiro with us? Was that you? Were you like spying on us? Are you brainwashed?”

Scary-Shiro raises an eyebrow, tilts his head slightly, and studies Lance very carefully. “Shiro, is it?”

The whole world seems to tilt sideways along with his head, and suddenly Lance realizes he has no idea what’s going on. “You…do you really not know who Shiro is?”

Scary-Shiro looks to the door, once, almost cautiously, then back to Lance. “He’s our progenitor, isn’t he?”

Lance feels his lips moving without sound for a moment as he slowly realizes what this conversation might maybe actually be about. Unless it’s a trap. It could so be a trap. But would it—could it hurt to tell him about Shiro? Just? Shiro stuff, no tactical information, nothing like that? It’s not like his boss doesn’t already know a whole bunch about him, given that she made his arm and all, and also him. What if this is actually a chance to, like, reach out to him and unlock his secret potential as an awesome good guy if he’s really like Shiro deep down but didn’t realize it because nobody told him?

What if this is the only chance he has to get free and help anybody? Help _Allura?_

“Yeah,” he whispers. “Yeah, he is.” Scary-Shiro’s maybe even harder to read than the real deal, but there’s maybe a flash of genuine satisfaction in his eyes. “You didn’t know?” Lance adds, almost more to see his reaction than anything.

He gives an infinitesimal shake of his head. “No.”

“Takashi Shirogane.” Lance is still whispering. It’s hard not to, knowing that he’s telling this guy secrets he isn’t supposed to know. “That’s his full name, but everyone called him Shiro back at the Garrison—uh, that’s the place on our planet where we all trained to be space explorers. And he was the best they ever had…”

 

* * *

 

**_—you are not the human called Takashi Shirogane—_ **

 

* * *

 

Silence.

Darkness.

Thumb against her pinky: tick. Thumb against her ring finger: tick. Thumb against her middle finger: tick. Thumb against her forefinger: tick. Four marks around the ticker. Reset.

If Allura hasn’t lost count, or counted too fast, or counted too slow, she’s been strapped down in sensory deprivation for at least a varga, perhaps almost two. She’s fairly certain she hasn’t been moved. Occasionally she thinks somebody has passed close enough to her chair that she feels the whisper of displaced air or the heat of their passing, but it could just as easily be a hallucination. A little somatic one, body image distorting even though she can’t shapeshift, things moving in the blackout of the helmet, the deck rocking. She’s already hallucinating. Less than two vargas. She _thinks_.

She sits ramrod straight in her chair, chin up. Even now, she will not give them the satisfaction of seeing her writhe in fear. Besides, it helps with the hallucinations.

She has no further clue what ritual Haggar spoke of, although she can hardly imagine it will be pleasant. She thinks, more than once, that she smells ozone rising in the room, the horrible crackle of black lightning. She is not sure whether it is a hallucination.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

She sinks her teeth into her lip against the rising tide of utter disorientation. Squeezes her eyes shut and opens them, in rhythm with her count, until she catches sparks in the darkness—though that could just as easily be another hallucination. She has to stay in her body, stay focused, resist the urge to panic about the rest of the team or dissociate into the darkness—

A hand seizes hers, broad, metal warmed from flesh. Flattens it against the arm of the chair and wraps it in something that might be gauze. Then the other. Then she’s abandoned again.

No more finger-counting.

Allura squares her jaw and moves her lips silently within the helmet, invisible, not letting her captors see so much as a twitch.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Half a varga more, at least.

The scent of ozone rises. Thick and dark and wild. She can feel her blood run cold, her spine prickle, and her helpless fingers claw in the gauze they’re wrapped in. She digs her heels against the legs of her chair.

“Here it comes,” she whispers, or at least she thinks she does in the swallowing silence.

She would very much like to think she’s ready.

Allura’s channeled the power of a battleship-class crystal every day for half her life. She’s revived an entire Balmera, operated the giant teludav, touched the burning quintessence of the entirety of Voltron on Naxcela.

Not even that last prepares her for the power that arcs through her body now.

She only realizes she’s screaming because her throat is raw and she’s out of breath. Her whole body’s in seizure, skull knocking against the inside of the helmet. Her vision’s sparking, black lightning searing, bursts of sick yellow light.

The yellow light of Haggar’s eyes.

The last shreds of reality fall away and Allura slides from her spasming body into the depths of the beyond as Haggar rips open the flickering surface of her mind and shoves herself deep, deep inside.

 

* * *

 

**_—you will not move or speak again—_ **

 

* * *

 

The clone listens. The clone absorbs everything Lance has to say about the real Shiro, and there are moments—tiny, tiny moments, maybe Lance is making them up—when his gaze softens a touch, or his eyebrows quirk, or something, _something_ about him is not scarily out of fucks.

And Lance has a lot to say. About how amazing Shiro is, and how he takes care of them, and how he always works so hard to do the right thing, and the part that really makes something in his chest clench is the way this guy narrows his eyes and asks _why._ Why would he bother. What does doing the right thing even mean.

So he swallows his fear and tries to explain, and he feels like he may as well be speaking Latin. Until the clone holds up his hand halfway through a sentence. “We’re running out of time.”

“Shit—o-okay.” Lance feels his mouth dry, licks his lips. “Do you—I-I could tell you more if you let me…”

He feels the words die in his throat at the cold look in the clone’s eyes. Almost pitying. “You really thought this was an exchange?” He stands, rolling his shoulders back. “If I let you go, I’d die by inches. Even if I could be this man I was made from, I wouldn’t know how.” He pauses, tilts his head. “It’s good to know, though. Goodbye.”

He ruffles Lance’s sweaty hair, once, and turns on his heel.

“Wait!” Lance yelps. “It doesn’t have to be like that! Please. Get me a gun and I won’t let anything near you. W-we can break out the others, we can save Allura and she’ll save us all, you don’t have to go it alone. Just—just please, god, please—”

The door opens.

“Well?” comes one of those ghostly, hollow voices that turns Lance’s blood to ice.

“Nothing useful,” the clone says, flat and dismissive. “He’s as tight-lipped as the Princess. Do whatever you like.”

And then he’s gone, heavy boots down the hallway, and Lance lets his head thunk back against the slab he’s strapped to with a strangled sob.

 

* * *

 

**_—not the human called—_** he’s going to go insane like this, he has to stop letting this get to him ** _—discarded meat—_** he’s just a thing, like them, he was a fool to ever think he was human ** _—your time—_** he has to escape ** _—is over—_** someone just like him is disemboweled in the corner with reddish-gray loops frozen to the floor ** _—not move—_** struggling to breathe through the muzzle and his tears, too tired even to shiver ** _—return for you—_** will anyone come for him, would any of them even care, do they know he’s just another clone ** _—the illusion that is your mind—_** his mother never knew him, did she, his own mother never knew him ** _—and Voltron—_**

—he’d rather die.

He’d rather die than betray Voltron. No matter what kind of creature he is.

Somewhere in the distant reaches of space, the Black Lion roars.

 

* * *

 

Two druids file in the open door, and for a long, sinking moment, Lance can only see their shadows, stretched in the light coming in from the hallway.

The door slams. The shadows disappear. He can’t hear their footsteps, and for a tick he harbors the inane hope that they just peeked their heads in and decided to deal with him later.

“Should we keep the discarded limb?”

Lance screams high and thin behind clenched teeth and strains for freedom so hard he nearly blacks out.

“May as well.” Lance can see a mask out of the corner of his eye, studying him impassively. “I doubt he’ll take to implantation better than the Champion stock, but you never know with this species.” There’s a pause as they move around, pushing something over that glides across the deck with a high scrape like nails on a chalkboard, and then there’s some sort of robot arm with metal pincers swinging into Lance’s view, and that is about when Lance starts hyperventilating. “What’s your name?”

“W—wh—why,” Lance stammers through his clenching throat. “Y-you didn’t…” Tell _him_ his name. Should they know that he was talking with that clone? Does he even care? He _left_ him here, he didn’t help him at all, he left him here to get cut up and killed—

“Just pick a letter,” the other druid says, pulling over another robot arm, this one with a silvery wheel that looks like a saw with no teeth.

“Lance!” He feels something hot prickling at his eyes. “My name’s Lance. Lance McClain.” Shit. Maybe his name’s gonna be the only thing left of him. Maybe if they make _copies_ of him to get cut up and killed, at least they’ll know they came from Lance and not nothing—no, they knew Shiro’s name, they must have known Shiro’s name, they never told him, why would they even bother—

Bony, ice-cold fingers prod his right thigh, impassive and thorough, like the druid’s mapping the muscles. Lance writhes, chokes back a sob.

They add two more straps, utterly immobilizing his leg, and then the part of the table underneath it just. Vanishes.

“Vascular containment?” one of the druids asks the other.

“Same as the last round of Champion tests. Tourniquet and attach the preliminary cuff within three vargas, drain removed limb for future blood replacement. Cauterization overloads the nervous system too easily in this species.”

There’s some tiny bit left in Lance that wants to be cool. So this is happening. He’ll have a badass robot leg. He’ll kick their asses with it. It’ll be fine.

The rest of him is absolutely fucking out of cool. The rest of him is a sobbing, begging, struggling wreck that wails when they tighten down the tourniquet, because that _hurts_ , even that hurts way too damn much, why aren’t they putting him under, why, why, how does that hurt so much. Like the worst of a blood pressure cuff except never letting up, and there’s this dull horrible vein-deep ache setting in all down his leg, and he—he isn’t going to _have_ a leg—

“Don’t take it please don’t take it y-you can’t take it please god I’ll do anything please you can’t _take that my MOM MADE THAT!_ ”

“Go slow,” one of the druids says, utterly ignoring his panicked scream echoing off the walls. “Separate the muscle groups for implantation before they stiffen.”

They pull down the arm that looks like strange pincers. It flickers, maybe because it’s weird flickery druid shit, maybe because he’s crying. He can’t get a good look at it. He can’t stop this. Why can’t he stop this?

He looks at his wildly twitching bare foot against the black wall for a moment, and he’s never gonna move that foot again, and he was just learning that new rope trick, and then he can’t look anymore, he just can’t.

The druid’s masks never change, and in their hoods there’s only darkness, and Lance stares into that darkness as red-hot pain bites into his aching thigh, just below the tourniquet. Bites and bites and bites, and he can’t stop screaming.

Then the druid crumples to the ground with silent flash of purple light, and a huge black-clad figure pulls its glowing blade out of the broken mask and whirls on the other.

The pincer arm, abandoned, is still inches deep in Lance’s thigh, and he whines and shakes like a leaf in the straps as three Blades of Marmora descend on the remaining druid. It’s lightning-fast, brutal. Lance can’t even see half of it. He’s screaming with something like relief, trying to shake tears out of his eyes because the world is blurring and the fight is ranging across the little room, and finally, finally, the other druid wails and burns out.

All three Blades are still standing, though the largest one is listing hard to one side.

Lance isn’t even sure he’s breathing with how tight his chest feels.

The smallest of them, lithe and tailless and with no freaky-long toes, slides his short blade into the horizontal sheath at the small of his back and runs for Lance.

“Keith and the Purple Ninjas,” Lance croaks through a wide, loopy grin. “Now touring to sold-out crowds.”

The impassive glowing mask winks away to show Keith’s face, cracked with concern as he slides the cutting arm out of Lance’s leg with shaking hands. “Lance,” Keith blurts. “Shit, Lance, stay with me.” Another Blade behind him does something at a panel and the restraints loosen with a whir. “Are you all right? What the hell is going on?”

“Awww you caaaare…” Lance grits his teeth against the searing pain in his thigh as he tries to sit up.

“Is your leg going to stay on? What’s wrong with Shiro?” Keith asks, voice a little desperate.

“I…” Okay, clutching at his leg is a bad idea. He’s still hyperventilating. There’s still a lot of blood, how is there that much blood even with the tourniquet? Keith’s steadying him, almost gently. His face is wet, he’s probably snotty, he wobbles instead of trying to wipe it. “I, I-I don’t actually know what’s wrong with Shiro but there’s also like twenty of him?”

Keith blanches. “There’s…” He gets one of Lance’s arms around his shoulder as he wrestles with that. Lance can dimly hear some Blade radio chatter coming from his collar that backs it up as they run into a Shiro in the hall, then another. “ _What._ ”

“They grew clones,” Lance manages. “I think?”

“Clones?” Keith echoes, frozen.

“Like. Shiro tanks.” Lance is pretty sure his face of desperate sympathy is cracked and all kinds of crazy. “One layer at a you do not need that mental image. Some of them have yellow eyes maybe they’re mind controlled or something. I dunno. Everything’s _bad_.”

Keith has Lance mostly on his feet when one of the other Blades comes over, inclines his? her? masked face at Keith, and then scoops Lance up bodily. Lance makes a kyelp sort of noise, which he doggedly chalks up to not being sure whether to yelp or kyaa, and not just because he was startled.

“When?” Keith asks quietly, that one syllable a world of doubt and pain.

“I don’t know,” Lance admits, raw and frank. “I don’t know. They choked out our Shiro, I don’t know where he is, I don’t—I don’t know if he’s really our Shiro. I’m sorry. Oh god. I don’t know what they’re doing to him. They tortured _Hunk_ , I think they wanna clone Pidge too, they were cutting off my leg, Jesus, Keith, what kind of bastards torture _Hunk?_ ” Panic jolts through him, and he clutches kind of desperately at the air in Keith’s direction. “Keith, Keith never mind me, you have to find Allura, one of the clones said Haggar was going to—w-was going to _eat her soul_ —”

Keith gives one tightly contained full-body shudder, and scrubs a black-gloved hand over his eyes, and says, as much into his com as to them, “Let’s get moving. Spread out and find all the prisoners. Don’t kill anybody who could be the real Shiro until we figure this out.”


	4. Ark of Souls

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me just slam-dunk this (long-ass) chapter in right before season five drops and josses me. I almost hope it josses me. Plz explain Project Kuron canon thx.
> 
> I should also note by now that this is technically gen but the kind of gen that’s gonna have both kissing and nonsexual symbolic anime nudity for “plot” “reasons,” because, well, idfic all the way.

 

**CHAPTER 4 - ARK OF SOULS**

 

Allura plunges headlong into the black and burning tides of Haggar’s mind, and for a nameless time, all she can do is scream.

_Two can play this game, little princess. Just as you absorbed the energy of the komar, I can absorb you. Any Altean witch has that power, and I am older and stronger by far._

A whirlpool. An inky maw. Chaos. There’s power trickling into her ears, her nose, invading, pulling, tearing at her flesh—her mind—her _self_. She clutches at her skin, flaking off in specks of blue light, easily swallowed. She spirals deeper, head over heels, crushing pressure like deep oceans. Beads of yellow fire strung through the abyss. Quintessence. The spine of Haggar’s power, each as huge as a planet, strung from horizon to horizon.

Ten thousand years. Returned from the spaces between realities and the frontier of death. Haggar is an abyss, immeasurably vast, and every bit of power Allura has is a tiny scrap against her.

Yet she can’t lose herself.

She refuses to lose herself.

Who is she? What is at the heart of her, inviolate?

She wraps herself in memories of everything she values, everything she learned at her father’s knee—for a moment the silky fabric of his cloak wraps around her, just like she used to roll herself up in it when she was little—

_Hypocrite. Genocide. Dead with your worthless planet._

The memories rip to tatters, wash away on the tide, and Allura howls and bleeds light.

The paladins, then. Voltron. The strength they’ve gathered, the territory they’ve won—the companionship among them—

_Fragile children. Weak. Short-lived. Even if by some miracle my empire does not shatter their tiny lives, they’ll be decapheebs dead before you show a single wrinkle. A wind through your hair._

Allura feels her eyes burn, her heart ache. Her tears are torn off her face, shreds of her fading power. She scrabbles to imagine her own paladin’s armor, wrap herself in it—the color of fallen heroes—nothing but the pink of her own lifeblood, leaking away—

_You’ll join them soon enough, if you want to think of it that way. But I’ve seen death. There’s no solace for you there._

The Blue Lion. The safest place in the universe, there in that cockpit, with the purring warmth of the machine-soul right beneath her—

She can imagine it so vividly that the walls form. The seat beneath her. Screens coming up like they do when the lion stirs to life, the faint whiff of ozone and salt, power and sea. Something almost like silence. Allura focuses on the control bars so hard her hands ache, bleeds on the floor, pulls the tatters of her mind tight around her—

The screens flicker purple.

_You think a mere construct of a lion can keep you safe? We plucked your Champion from his beast’s bosom._

“How?”

Allura digs her heels in and sets her jaw. So be it. No sense dwelling on what she’s lost, what she will inevitably lose, what little she has left. This is something she _doesn’t_ have, one shred of knowledge to chase, and she sets after it like a harrier-fierce, because this, at least, cannot be stripped from her—she needs to _know_.

“ _How?_ ” she barks again, louder.

Resistance forms. The black depths thicken. Allura punches her imaginary control bars forward, hard, wills herself through it. If Haggar doesn’t want her to know, all the more reason to push. Allura’s not gone yet. And she’s deep in Haggar’s mind. May as well take advantage.

Even if there’s nothing she can do with the knowledge—

No. One thing at a time. She will inevitably lose everything, outlive everyone she knows and loves a second time; she’s always known that. It’s what she does before she loses that matters.

_If it would be a mercy to let you die before that, then it is a mercy I grant you, little girl._

The Blue Lion of her soul claws and thrashes its way through the endless depths of Haggar’s mind. What happened to Shiro, the real one?—how did this clone project begin?—memories splash through the cockpit, Shiro strapped to a table, wild-eyed, screaming and screaming as the druid finishes peeling back the flesh of his arm, wipes the white beam of bone gleaming in the red mess, pulls over the saw—Allura screws her eyes shut against tears, keeps pushing, that’s a distraction, that doesn’t tell her how they got him out of his lion—great fangs rising from the depths, tearing at her hull, an attack redoubled because Haggar—

Haggar is frightened.

Allura laughs like a battle cry and freezes the black witch-dragon’s fangs and dives deeper, deeper. Veils part. Rifts open. Allura’s an arrow of foreign blue light into the very tainted depths, through a final barrier—

The world falls silent.

The crackling darkness is gone.

Here, millennia deep in the twisted sea, is a single bubble of something else entirely. Tiny. Untouched. Bright.

The lion is gone. Every one of Allura’s defenses broken. She stands naked in this silent little room, watching dust motes dance in the brilliant white sunlight, and turns slowly in place, and feels tears spill down her cheeks.

Altea.

She’s on Altea.

A tower in the city, a tastefully appointed little chamber with wide windows. Datapads. Knick-knacks. There’s a careless humility to the space.

Allura totters to the window and plasters her hands upon it and drinks in the sight. One of the habitat rings rising at a glorious angle in the afternoon sun. Ships passing in the sky. Spires upon spires, silver and blue. There’s the palace on the ancient hill, the sprawl built and built upon itself for long generations. The green mountains preserved outside the city bounds. She’s in one of the university towers, she realizes.

Honerva’s old office. It must be.

Allura wonders dimly if this is to be her prison for all eternity. If she could bear to tear herself from Altea yet again. She can see her reflection, half-silvered and ghostly, caught in the glass with the bustling glory of her city behind her. Her eyes wide and stricken. Tears rolling down her—

_—face. I run fingers over my it, shaking. This isn’t my body. Red tracks like tears down my cheeks, withered with age, small and frail. I know this face. But I thought her skin was purple, her eyes yellow with power, lid to lid. Now it’s a warm dusky brown. Like Allura’s. Her eyes almost human, her ears small and pointed._

_I’m. In Haggar’s body? Haggar is Altean?_

_The horror sends me reeling._

_“High Priestess, you’re needed.”_

_The voice, deep and hollow with that particular echo of a druid’s faceless mask, sends a spike of instinctive fear through me. Mad yellow light and black tides of power rise, and in an instant, I drown again, sinking—_

—through the liquid glass of the window, through her reflection.

Allura falls over the glittering skyline of Altea, stretching one hand up, reaching with everything she has.

“Shiro!”

 

* * *

 

Lance goes in and out for a while, however hard he tries not to. He’s ass-up like a sack of potatoes over the shoulder of the biggest of the Blades that rescued him, jolting along down identical hallways with his head pounding and his leg throbbing. Keith’s running out ahead, low and watchful, scouting their path.

“Lance,” Keith says at some point, and the world sways back and forth. “Lance,” again.

“Mmuh?”

“Where are the lions? Do we need to find another way off ship?”

Lance closes his eyes for a moment, and when he opens them again, they’re in another hallway. No. Bigger than a hallway. Much bigger. Landing bay? He’s right side up again. Whoever’s holding him is very warm.

“Jettison,” he says, and Keith, leaning over him, blinks. “Jettisoned. For pickup. Then they jumped to hyperspace.”

Keith looks entirely bewildered.

“The lions,” Lance says slowly.

“Shit,” Keith breathes. “Even if they move by themselves, they can’t _get_ that far—”

The deck jars under them with a tremendous bang.

“IIII didn’ do it,” Lance blurts.

The outside doors of the landing bay bow in with another horrible noise, and Lance feels his eyes widen, his whole body jolt with ice water and sheer terror. He’s in his boxers, no helmet, if the bay doors break, he’ll suffocate, freeze—

Keith makes one horrible choking noise in his throat and reaches for his own collar.

The noises stop.

Keith stops halfway through undoing some part of his blade suit with his other hand—the helmet part, no doubt, and there’s a wretched sinking feeling in Lance’s gut at the thought.

The marks on the bay doors look almost like—claws?

Then the empty air in the center of the landing bay rips open onto starfields and light, and with a flare of purple glory and a tremendous roar of impacted space, the Black Lion claws its way into reality. Blades of light trail from its wings, folded close to its back to fit under the too-low-for-lions ceiling. Its eyes are searing bright, and it’s thrumming with life, and Lance stops breathing for a moment in sheer awe.

Keith drops his hand to Lance’s shoulder with a hint of a tremor.

“ _I_ didn’t do it,” he breathes, barely audible. “I-I don’t think.”

“Good kitty,” Lance purrs.

 

* * *

 

Altea crumbles around her.

Silver towers tilt and crack and slide. Gusts of black lightning crackle across the sky. The horizon angles, spins, as Allura falls head over heels.

Between the towers, instead of the tidy streets of the city, there’s nothing but black glass. A mirror. Allura tumbles towards it, struggling for some semblance of control. To have come this far—to have realized he’s _here_ and not be able to reach him—

She plunges through the glass. Falls into her reflection. Reaching with everything she has.

_I refuse to yield. Not to Zarkon. Not to his witch. I don’t know what nightmare this is or why I can’t wake up, but I’m not going to give them the satisfaction of my surrender. Even in my dreams. Even if it kills me._

Honerva’s office, spinning by. The mirror by the door. Falling. Falling.

_I see—my own reflection now? God, my hair’s gotten long. How long has it been? Mother was right, I’d never look good with long hair. But why are my eyes so empty? Why am I in a tank? Why—why doesn’t my reflection move when I do?_

Haggar had—reflected his _mind_. That’s how her construct had known them so well. Allura laughs breathlessly even as she tumbles through another layer of shattered glass, plunging deeper. She must be close. So close—

The darkness here isn’t lightning and fire. It’s something far deeper, far more still. The scent of death hangs on the air.

Allura isn’t falling. She isn’t walking. She just— _is._

There’s a little girl in baggy clothes hunched around something that glows, and that light is the only thing for miles and miles of oblivion.

The little girl is Altean, and her hair is dove gray, and her markings are red and tidy little crescents, and she’s wearing the crumpled alchemist’s uniform of a much older woman, and there are tears running down her cheeks.

The light is Shiro.

For a long moment, Allura hesitates, poised somewhere between fear and anger and something far more hot and unwelcome bubbling up in her chest.

“Who are you?” she asks at last, as calmly as she can.

“I just wanted to make the world a better place,” the little girl sniffles. “So did he.”

“Why are you here?”

“Because I’m dead,” the girl says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “And the yellow light decides everything now.” Silence stretches for a moment before she lifts her head a little, uncurls, and offers up the glowing light in her hands. “He’s not dead, though. Take him home.”

Allura reaches out, and the tiny, stubborn, stupidly brave speck of power and light that is Shiro’s soul slides into her, easy as that.

Before she can even decide whether she can swallow her pride enough to thank a piece of Haggar, no matter how small and buried and dead, the world splits open on a scream, knives and fire and wordless rage.

Raw power snaps and blows up in Allura’s face like a grenade.

She _hurts_.

For a long moment, that’s all she can sort out. She hurts. Eventually she realizes there’s sick purple light. She blinks. Her ears are ringing, a horrible deafening whine. Her vision is blurring, blinding light, wet with tears.

She’s sprawled on her back, bleeding, aching, pieces of metal scattered under her.

A broken helmet frames her face.

The glow of her own power flares around her.

“ _No_ ,” Haggar growls, a hissing swirl of robes on the edge of a black circle drawn on the floor. “ _No!_ Kill her now! Before she gathers her power!”

Allura feels like her body’s a live wire, magic already flaring from the effort of breaking through Haggar’s defenses, taking Shiro’s soul—she can _feel_ him, even now, dimly aware and beating inside her—

The first druid’s blast hits her, spasms of red-hot pain. And then Haggar’s own magic, screaming torrents of black lightning, curses and destruction and denial.

Just like the komar.

“You—overreached—yourself,” Allura grits out, and catches that lightning like it’s a line between them, and _pulls_. Absorb. Purify. Turn it back on her. She’s done it before. It’s _madness_ , this whole thing is madness, she thinks dimly of Lance’s speech on Nacxela and could almost laugh. Look at her now, drinking this power down.

Haggar spits out a curses and vanishes in a flicker of black light.

The druids follow.

Allura realizes after a long moment that she’s floating a few inches off the deck, crackling with blue light. She no longer feels any pain. Just light.

She reels for a long, long while, panting, wrestling with the power beating through her. Peels off the last bits of broken restraints, shattered from the blowback of Haggar’s failed spell. Curls a hand over her chest and tries desperately to reach him. “It’s me,” she whispers. “Allura. You’re safe now. I promise.”

Then one last memory drifts up from his mind, and the black lion roars in the distance, and suddenly she knows exactly what she must do.

 

* * *

 

Being right side up is absolutely helping with the whole Lance staying conscious thing. So’s the wall behind his back and the crate he’s sitting on, firm and cool, and the jolt of adrenaline from thinking he might get spaced, and the reassuring bulk of the Black Lion, cat-loafed in the landing bay because the wings are too big to fit if it sits up normally. It’s got its barrier up, but still— _lion_. Lions make everything better. Lance may have actually said that, out loud, to the two Blade operatives who’ve stayed behind to keep his wounded ass out of trouble as the rest of them sweep the ship for all their missing pieces.

One of them muffles a snort behind his? her? mask, so hey, the Blade can’t be _all_ frowns all the time. Which is also good. Lance might be saying that out loud too, he’s not entirely sure.

Then Keith and Hunk and Pidge all spill through the door, and Lance just about shrieks with relief.

“Holy cow your leg holy cow you’re alive oh my god,” Hunk babbles, and drags him up into a crushing, welcome hug.

“I’m aliiiive,” Lance moans giddily into his thick, steadying shoulder. “I’m alive I’m in one piece I have never been happier to see that mullet. _You’re_ alive thank fuck she got you good. Pidge. Pidge. Are you alive.”

“I am standing _right here_ why wouldn’t I be,” Pidge grumbles, and awkwardly pats his shoulder. She’s pale, shoulders turtled up to her ears, and there’s a postage-stamp of red in the crook of her arm, trailing blood. Hunk’s breathing heavily, quivering a little even as he doggedly clutches Lance close.

“Let’s. Sit.” Lance drags a deep breath, squeezes Hunk back as best as he can. “I found some crates, they’re awesome. Grade A crates. Hunk. Hunk, I’m in space and there are clones and somebody tried to cut off my leg and I’m excited about crates, this is my life. Why is this my life.”

“Because you wanted to sneak out and meet girls,” Hunk says, and they totter to the crates together. “Our lives are so fucked up.”

“Jesus coño chicken shit Christ,” Lance says, by way of agreement.

Somewhere amongst the bustle, Lance notices another group come in, but he doesn’t quite manage to focus on them until Pidge says, “ _Oh_.”

Lance drags his head up and sees another two Shiros for a moment. He squints. Okay. One. Stumbling between a pair of Blade agents.

This one’s got the right haircut, scar, arm. He’s in Voltron-issue long johns just like Hulk and Pidge, barefoot, and he’s just—he’s not the one who’d fucked with Lance earlier, he’s just plain _not_ , he moves all different. Hands cuffed behind him, head bowed, and from the way he’s walking, he wouldn’t be walking at all without a Blade holding him up. Swollen, untreated bruises, crusted blood all down his neck and chest, and he’s dead pale. Something that looks like a freaking dog muzzle hangs from one strap around his neck, and there are red prints on his jaw. There’s something sparkly in his hair, streaks of it on his face, and for a moment, Lance can’t parse what that could even be.

He’s also staring up at the Black Lion, lounging in its barrier, with naked awe. In the newer and older senses of the word.

“He was restrained and silenced in a storage freezer,” the Blade leading the little group continues, “and didn’t attack us when we freed him.”

Keith’s eyes narrow, and he pads up with intense focus.

Lance realizes exactly _what_ storage freezer it must have been. The sparkle is frozen sweat. Frozen—tears. Shit. Lance puts his head on his knees for a moment, feeling thoroughly ill.

“Who are you, then?” Keith asks flatly.

It takes a horribly long time for Shiro to even pick his head up. He’s hyperventilating, shivering violently. Lance isn’t even sure he’s seeing Keith, or the landing bay, or the other Blades, or him. Christ, being beaten and gagged and half-frozen in a room full of your own mangled corpses would make anyone completely lose their shit, right?

“Who _are_ you?” Keith repeats, anger shading into his voice.

“H-hey,” Lance manages. Keith hadn’t seen the place. Keith _should_ never see the place, not with how he is about Shiro. “Give him a moment. He’s gotta be ours, right? They were—they hurt him, he’s not one of theirs—”

“That doesn’t mean he’s not a trap.”

“Since when do you care about traps, Keith, come on, look at him, he’s—he’s worse off than me, just give him a moment—”

One of the doors to the landing bay flies off its hinges and lands, the entire slab, with a resounding bang.

Every weapon in the room comes up.

It’s Allura, perfectly poised on one foot from kicking the thing off its hinges. She lowers her leg delicately, with only a tiny flicker of pain across her face, and strides into the landing bay.

Thin wisps of silvery-blue light boil off her skin.

Every weapon in the room comes back down.

She looks—like shit warmed over. Like the rest of them. Pink long johns, beaten to hell. Her hair’s fallen out of her battle bun, trailing in a ragged mess behind her, streaked with sweat and. Blood. That pink stuff sticking her hair into clumps, dripping down one side of her face, oozing from the prints of metal knuckles—blood. Lance staggers to his feet.

“Allura—Allura, are you—?” She’s clearly. Not. All right. Lance’s chest is _aching_. He’s not the only one crying out, rushing towards her. Well, okay, it’s more of a stumble, given how well his leg isn’t working.

“I’m fine,” she says, like it’s an absolute command and not a personal statement. “I think Haggar’s running for it. I doubt we’ll be able to evacuate and destroy the ship before she leaves.” She takes in the situation with a few glances. “Pidge, try to establish contact with the Castle. Keith, Kolivan, would you be able to determine whether there’s a self-destruct sequence or other such trap?”

“Of course,” Kolivan rumbles, making his mask disappear as he inclines his head. Lance squawks faintly, because he is only just realizing Kolivan is here, somehow, given all the ninja masks, and he’s pretty sure he was ass-up over Kolivan’s shoulder for some of this technicolor shitshow of a day, and that’s going to haunt him and what’s left of his dignity for weeks. Movements. Whichever.

Keith’s spine snaps an inch straighter the way it usually does for Shiro’s orders, and he falls back from the cuffed maybe-not-Shiro and finds a console.

Pidge looks to the nearby Blades. “Uh, I need my armor, did any of you guys find my armor? Actually, I _really_ need my armor, I got most of the files on this project before they grabbed me, they’re in my wrist com.”

“Allura,” Lance starts.

“Yes, please recover the paladin’s bayards and armor,” Allura adds briskly. “Especially the bayards, as those cannot be replaced.” She pauses, taking them all in, and for a moment, Lance sees deep grief in her eyes. “Oh, Lance. Hunk. I’m so sorry.”

“We’ll be fiiiiiine,” Hunk groans, cheerful and loopy.

“Princess,” says the Blade of Marmora still holding the half-frozen, cuffed Shiro in the controlled chaos. “What about him?”

Allura studies him for a brief moment, then says, “He’s the one we picked up after that incident with the rift.” She starts marching towards him. “He’s also nothing but a fake and a plant.”

“Oh, fuck,” Lance groans, feeling his gut go all icy. Pidge reels. Hunk just gives a shuddering sigh and looks at the floor.

Keith looks like he’s been run through the heart.

“I,” stammers not-actually-Shiro-after-all-holy-quiznak-everything-sucks. “I’m—”

He falls silent because Allura has grabbed his jaw. And then she pulls his guard’s blade from his own sheath. That sends a hiss and ripple through the other Blades in the room, the sort of hiss and ripple that makes Lance think anyone held in less esteem would be dead for such a transgression of their honor or somesuch.

“Don’t—!” Lance blurts. “He still took care of us, he still—!”

Allura’s hand moves almost too fast to see. Two flicks of her wrist. Shiro gives one stunned yelp of pain.

“I’ll decide what to do with you later,” Allura says. “But I’m done with this charade.”

There’s a bloody mark on his face. An X, Lance realizes, carved into his cheek, deep enough to scar.

“I know where the real Shiro is,” Allura says, turning back to the rest of them. There’s a strange glint in her eyes, and she stands steel-girder straight despite her battered body. Okay, that might be a step beyond a glint. Her eyes might be glowing. Lance is very, very lost.

Then she hands the Blade back his weapon and walks right up to the Black Lion, sitting stubbornly in its barrier.

Keith scrambles up beside her, lays a hand on the barrier, and blinks. Rocks backwards on his heels, something in his face flattening out in resignation. “Allura, I…it’s rejecting me. We can’t get in. Not without—”

“Shiro,” Allura says, quite calmly, and the barrier melts under her palm.

“Whoa whoa what,” Lance says thickly and limps after her, almost too confused to think about the pain. They all do, as the lion’s jaws open, except for Kolivan and the other Blades, and not-actually-Shiro, who’s sinking to huddle on his knees, shaking. Keith trails in last, rigidly tense, something black and ugly on his face like Lance has never seen.

Lance falls in beside him, not in the least because Keith is offering a shoulder to lean on. “Hey, c’mon, it’ll be okay. Whatever she knows, she can get him back. Allura magic, it happens, ask us about Naxzela when I’m in the mood to tell you about some technicolor bullshit.”

“You already told me five times,” Keith says, after too much of a pause for it to be real banter. “And you’re the one who’s beat to shit. I should be telling you it’s okay.” His voice sounds small, strangled.

“Yeah, but that’s not your best thing. I mean, no offense, it’s just a fact. ’S cool. I’m good. This is you telling me it’s okay.”

They barely fit in the narrow hallway up to the cockpit. But Allura doesn’t open that door. Instead, she flattens her hand against the opposite wall.

“Wait, what?” Pidge squawks.

Allura’s hand starts glowing blue-white, and then everyone has the good sense to fall silent.

When the glow fades, a door opens. Opposite the cockpit. Deeper into the lion.

“I…I never realized we could…” Pidge starts, eyes wide in wonder.

It’s narrow. It’s dark. The walls pulse with strange energy. Allura’s glowing faintly, and it’s the only light save a faint black-purple shimmer in the metal of the lion’s guts. The lion’s heart. They have to fall in single file, and Lance drops behind Keith, mostly so that the loser doesn’t fall behind. He’s trailing his fingertips along the wall, tenderly, like it’s a religious experience. Lance mostly just feels in over his head—okay sure, if this was Red or Blue he’d love them tender, but this is Black, this is above his pay grade, and mostly he just has to brace himself against the walls like he’s crab-climbing because of his damn leg.

Then everything opens out into a chamber large enough for them to spread out and get a look at the center, and this is _even more_ above his pay grade.

It’s. Shiro.

Shiro’s here.

He’s naked, motionless, floating against a wall. Metal arm, white streak, all his scars, the close-shaved undercut he’d worn back in the day. Lance feels his mouth fall slack, because everything is starting to make a weird and pretty terrifying sort of sense that he is not at all prepared for, and he was _also_ not prepared to see Shiro’s dick.

There’s this strange, glowing brace, crystal blue-white feathers, linking Shiro’s back to the wall of his lion. Like wings. Like the wings had sprouted from his own flesh and not the lion’s back.

“Did it _eat_ him?” Hunk blurts.

“Is he—alive?” Pidge shakes her head a few times. “I-I don’t have my wrist com, I can’t scan…”

Keith sinks slowly to his knees, dim horror on his face. “He was…he was here all along, and I didn’t know…”

“Well, he wanted you to take over for him, right?” Lance says, easy as anything. “Guess he was just keeping an eye on you.”

And then Allura steps forward and kisses Shiro. Well, she’s been whispering a lot of things along the way. But mostly, really, Lance notices the kissing.

 

* * *

 

There’s a whole lot of awareness beating inside Allura at once. Jumbled memories smoothing out, making more and more sense as Shiro’s soul uncurls, surges to the surface. The lion has its own senses. Its own motion. Its own will. The lion doesn’t need a pilot to jerk joysticks around, not really, that’s just training wheels. A starting point. She’s not figuring these things out so much as _knowing_ them, in one big intuitive leap. No, being _brought_ to know them by the great beating heart of the lion around them all.

Only Zarkon ever realized this much. Her father never fully understood what he had built. She knows that now too.

But the deeper a pilot connects to their lion, the more psychically vulnerable he is. A battle flashes across her new _knowing_ , Shiro and Zarkon in the plane of raw thought. Shiro on the brink of death when the black lion made her opinion known.

Her? His?

Pronouns. Meaningless.

Allura doesn’t realize how much of this she’s said out loud until she hears Pidge mutter, “I _know_ , right?”

Shiro had progressed to the ultimate stage of piloting during that final desperate push against Zarkon so many months ago. His body sucked deeper, his quintessence spreading its wings, triggering unfathomable power to run down Voltron’s bond to his right arm, his blazing sword, Red, Keith. He—should have popped right back out to the cockpit afterward. Zarkon had, the one time he’d passed deeper. Allura feels-senses-knows the slide of his great Galra body through the metal of herself-the-lion, mechanical guts, the spark of his quintessence against her mind, and that was far more intimate a thought than she had _ever_ wanted to have about _that_.

But. The deeper the connection, the more vulnerable the pilot. And Zarkon, knowing the lions’ secrets like nobody else, had caught and stolen Shiro’s soul, leaving his body slumbering in the black lion. They’d struggled within him, leaving Zarkon’s own body in a coma. Then Haggar had pulled him out to save her Emperor, at least the first step before she had to work far more magic to wake him. Then he’d floated there, locked deep in her mind, captive.

It’s—not even that long, for all this knowledge to crystallize in Allura’s mind. But she holds focus, because she knows what he’s here for. She can be embarrassed about this later; mostly, right now, she’s annoyed because he’s tall and she needs to go on tip-toes and brace herself on his cold, bare, empty chest.

Allura cups Shiro’s jaw to open his mouth, and kisses him, and pours his soul back home.

It’s a rush like tears as he pours out of her, the whole length and strength of him, a torrent of memory and will, and she mostly hooks one hand around his muscled shoulder and holds on. Images of Earth, childhood, classrooms, climbing a tree, piloting, Voltron, the arena, her own smile, Keith laughing as the wind whips through his hair, choking the life out of a broken enemy, the austerely beautiful icy wastes of the edge of a solar system, Haggar’s lab bench, everything. It’s a blur, dreamlike, and she’ll doubt she’ll remember much, which is good, because this is _singularly_ invasive. But he’s Shiro, and reclaiming him is not optional.

She breathes him into his lungs, and for a single, horrible moment, nothing happens.

And then the black lion jump-starts his heart in a spark of quintessence, and he jolts and coughs and takes one deep shuddering breath of his own, and the metal wings peel out of his back, and everything is going to be all right.

Somewhere, in hard reality, she hears Lance blurt, “So if I fuse with my lion do _I_ get a kiss?”

“No,” says Pidge flatly. “We’re leaving you there. And drawing dicks on your face.”

“And then Allura can fly me any day~”

“Yeah but what if you fuse with Red,” Hunk points out.

“Waauugh!”

 

* * *

 

“ _Keith_ ,” says a remarkably tinny incarnation of Kolivan’s voice from the collar of his uniform. “ _Inform the rest of your group that we have a situation. Exit the lion with care._ ”

Shiro, shivering with the cowl of Keith’s Blade suit wrapped around his waist, mumbles something Lance can’t quite make out, and Lance hears everyone in the bowels of the Black Lion stiffen with alarm at once. There’s a round of fierce whispering, and then Allura shakes herself slightly, picks Shiro up in a bridal carry like it’s nothing, and says, “Keith, please help Lance.”

“What—what’s going on?” Lance whispers, leaning hard on Keith as they all shuffle back out.

Keith doesn’t answer, and Lance can see a muscle jumping in his jaw before his mask flickers back into place.

“We will need to negotiate, I believe,” Allura says, with a great deal of forced calm.

Down the ramp of the lion’s jaws, there’s no Haggar. No army. Just one man. The clone who’d shaken down Lance. His metal arm’s up in a loose battle stance, and in his other hand, there’s something small and black and flickering.

“This is a dead man’s switch to self-destruct the entire ship,” scary-Shiro says, dangerously calm. “Yes, your Marmora friends have verified this. Let’s negotiate again, Princess.”

Allura’s jaw tightens, and she stares him down in grim silence. “I thought your team had disabled the self-destruct,” she says quietly to Keith.

“We can only account for a protocol left in the computer,” Kolivan rumbles At least Lance is pretty sure that’s Kolivan; they’ve all put their masks back up. “A remote detonator like that uses a deep back door. We’d need at least ten doboshes to disable it. I didn’t think she’d go far enough to have one on hand.”

“Of course she would,” scary-Shiro says, matter-of-fact. “Stage 4 is compromised. Project Kuron is being reorganized and repurposed.” It’s the same sort of tone with which he said things about _punishments for disobedience_ , and Lance thinks of all the bodies in the fridge and feels a chill run down his spine.

“Where is Haggar?” Allura asks, chin high, tightening her grip on Shiro with a heavy shrug.

“Oh, she’s long gone, along with her druids and the quintessence-enhanced stock. You gave her quite the scare.” There’s almost a trace of amusement in his voice.

“She—sent you on a suicide mission, didn’t she?” Lance blurts.

“Like I said. Repurposed.” Scary-Shiro tilts his head, studying him for a moment, and then a lot of other people look at Lance too. “What’s that look for, kid? I left you to die by inches.”

“Well yeah I wasn’t exactly thrilled about that part…”

“What is it that you want?” Allura asks sharply.

Scary-Shiro is quiet for a moment, then says, almost contemplatively, “That’s the real deal, right? Our progenitor?”

There’s a whole lot of people glaring at him in defensive anger. Lance, swaying against Keith’s side, looks at Shiro instead, at the shock and horror crowding out the disorientation. “Allura,” Shiro mumbles. “Let me…I can walk…”

“You most certainly can not,” Allura says, almost fondly, and sets him down regardless, with great care. His knees buckle; he sags against her shoulder. “We just got him back,” she tells scary-Shiro with remarkable and slightly passive-aggressive pleasantry. “I’m loathe to use him as a bargaining chip.”

“You’re…” Shiro says, staring at his clone. His other clone, who’s staring at him, slack-jawed and hollow-eyed. “You’re both…w-when did they…”

“I was decanted eleven movements ago. I don’t know when Project Kuron began.” Scary-Shiro carefully paces closer, still holding the detonator high. Shiro looks like he very much wants to mirror him, but he’s too busy white-knuckling Allura’s shoulder. “I’m the forty-third subject.”

“Forty-three,” Shiro breathes. “Dear god. Why.” He swallows. “Why are you here? You could have just carried out your mission—blown us all to hell—”

“To see you,” scary-Shiro says, voice so carefully pitched to make it sound like he doesn’t care. “And the rest of them. That kid left me curious.” He’s giving the real Shiro that intense study now, like he’s trying to drink in everything he’s missing about himself with one long stare. “Hn. Subject seventeen told me once, before I beheaded him, that choosing one’s own death is the greatest power a man has. I wasn’t sure what he meant by that until now.”

“You don’t have to die,” Shiro says firmly. “Turn that thing off. We can all walk away from this.”

Scary-Shiro huffs an utterly humorless laugh. “Into your prison cell? Take a look at your Princess’ face. I’m not going to be what you or that kid expect of me.”

“What—what about him?” Pidge asks, waving to not-actually-Shiro, still kneeling between two Blades with an X carved on his face. “Who is he?”

Scary-Shiro gives him a quick up and down. “Designation?”

“I…I don’t know what you mean,” not-actually-Shiro says, voice thin.

Scary-Shiro huffs in frustration. “Project Kuron, subject Y0XT…”

Dull horror creeps over the other clone’s face. And then the real Shiro’s as he shivers too, still leaning hard on Allura, and pleads faintly, “That’s not…it doesn’t matter…”

“Remember the moment you were decanted,” scary-Shiro says, voice oddly quiet and flat. “You wouldn’t have been sure how to move your arms and legs. You’d still be coughing up growth fluid. They would have laid you out like a corpse, checked your pupils with a bright light, recorded your serial number. Y0XT…”

“Three nine,” not-actually-Shiro whispers. His face has gone horribly blank, eyes a little wild. He’s shivering again. A tear slides into the bloody mark Allura had left on his face. “Three nine.”

 

* * *

 

_Project Kuron, subject Y0XT39._

He lists on his knees, eyes burning. He feels like his mind has been turned inside out, scraped hollow. Memory surfacing, unfurling, cracking open and spilling over his brain.

The last shreds of hope that he could be human break and peel off, burnt-out fuel tanks shedding and floating down into the atmosphere to char, only there’s no second stage to switch over to, there’s just. Whatever he is. Naked in space.

“Ah,” the other clone breathes, a strange, distant expression crossing his face. “The special one.”

Somebody asks what that’s supposed to mean. He honestly doesn’t know who. He feels like he’s watching the world from inside a vacuum chamber, sound muffled, slowly choking out. Most of them are focused on the guy with the detonator, of course. Or just reeling. Hunk looks wrung dry, lightning-burnt. Lance’s leg, tourniqueted, cut almost to the bone. He should have protected them, he should have…

Shiro, the real one, the human, still limp against Allura’s strong shoulder, is looking at him like his heart is breaking, and he doesn’t know why.

“Hey,” somebody else says. Something moves in the corner of his eye. Pidge, crouching beside him. “Are you…still…oh, quiznak, what am I even trying to ask. Please tell me this isn’t some sort of you hear your code number and turn evil or go completely blank or something situation?”

He shakes his head slowly. Which doesn’t seem to reassure her at all. It’s _Pidge_ , and she’s scared, and he swallows a few times and dredges up words. “No. I remember…waking up, that’s all. Like he said.” He _does_ feel a little like he’s going completely blank. Shock, maybe. He remembers being—not a person at all. But she doesn’t need to concern herself with that.

Something beeps loudly.

“Well, that’s inconvenient,” says the other clone, studying the detonator in his hand. “Remote override. You’ve got sixty seconds. I can’t stop it.”

Chaos breaks out.

Somebody shouts something about the lion. The Blade agents space-jumped in. Not enough time to get to their ships. It’ll be a tight fit.

There’s less of an argument about taking him than he expected. Mostly the Blade operatives flanking him look to Pidge, because she’s the closest, and Pidge just says, “Help him up, jeez,” and that’s that. He’s confused. He’s too nerveless and handcuffed to show it.

They all wedge in. Two of the Blade agents have arms full of clattering armor and bayards, brought in while everyone was in the lion. Allura’s just thrown Lance over her shoulder since he’s half-crippled. Keith guides the real Shiro, half-naked and weak from sleep, into the pilot’s seat of the Black Lion, and he bows his head with a shaky breath and wraps his hands around the control bars and whispers, “Please,” and deja-vu runs all through him.

The viewscreens flare to life, and Subject Y0XT43 is a tiny black and purple speck to the lion’s eyes, and for a moment, as the thing in his hands beeps, one screen zooms in on his face. A last thin, humorless smile. One thumb drawn across his throat.

Then he takes two steps to the right, opens the launch bay doors, and drops the detonator.

The Black Lion rides the tide of decompression out into space, and he can’t even see if there’s a tiny black figure washed out with it to choke to death or whether he manages to hold onto something to burn swift and sure. He doesn’t even know which death he chose.

Fire fills the viewscreens, swallowing the corpses, the muscle-strung skeletons in their tanks, the sleeping newborns who had never so much as breathed air.

Subject Y0XT39 lets his head thump against the cockpit wall of the Black Lion and lets his mind go blank with something between grief and shock.

Somewhere in the packed cockpit, Lance is crying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaand it's all denouement from here. If you count this poor clone's identity reformation as denouement.


End file.
